Company Overview
Jordan Lisnow is Founder at CuffWay, an innovative medical device designed to automatically control endotracheal tube cuff pressures. Learn more at https://cuffway.us/.
Can you tell us a little about your background before starting at your company?
Before joining my current company, my path was a mix of entrepreneurship, investing, and an obsession with learning how businesses and markets work from a young age. I taught myself how to trade derivatives and stock markets at 13, spending countless hours studying macro trends, market psychology, and risk management. That early curiosity eventually led to experience trading on the FX capital markets desk at BNY and managing part of my university’s endowment fund, where I developed a strong foundation in investing, analysis, and decision-making under pressure.
At the same time, I was building companies throughout college, founding my first startup as a college Freshman. I became a 3x founder across industries including EdTech, construction technology, and SaaS marketplaces, with two successful exits along the way. One of the biggest lessons from that journey was learning how to operate in ambiguity — figuring out product-market fit, leading early sales, navigating enterprise procurement, fundraising, hiring, and scaling teams while still being a full-time student.
Balancing startups, investing, academics, fitness, and leadership roles on campus forced me to become extremely disciplined with my time and energy. I’ve always been drawn to high-intensity environments where I can learn quickly, build systems, and create leverage. Looking back, the common thread across everything I’ve done has been a deep curiosity about how ambitious ideas become real businesses — and how technology can create opportunities for people at scale.
How did you start at your company? What were the first steps you took to get it off the ground and how did you identify the need for your product/service in the market?
CuffWay started from a problem my co-founder, Shrihan, identified firsthand running active EMS shifts in high school, where intubation outcomes still depended entirely on manual judgment and a workforce stretched too thin. That exposure drove the first prototype, published peer-reviewed research, and a first-place finish at a national Department of Defense-sponsored research competition, all before college. At the University of South Carolina, continued EMS shifts kept surfacing the same failures in real ICU and transport settings. A year and a half later, that clinical obsession became CuffWay. I joined forces with Shrihan as we were in the same startup community in college, and he had reached out to me to be an advisor initially for growth/biz ops, and I soon thereafter joined the team as a co-founder alongside Dr. Boyd, who is a prior med device founder and prior faculty at Duke + Clemson, and Ashwith, who is a BME student at Georgia Tech.
What innovations or unique features set your company apart from others in the industry?
Every competitor in cuff pressure management, manual or automated, holds a fixed pressure against a trachea that never stops moving. Reusable manometers leave patients entirely unmonitored between checks. Hamilton Medical’s IntelliCuff automated the process but still maintains a static setpoint, and a 2023 multicenter study confirmed that even automated static controllers fail to reduce tracheal mucosal injury. IntelliCuff has been reported to the FDA over 130 times for air leaks. The field has optimized the wrong variable.
CuffWay is the only device that continuously senses each patient’s tracheal movement and modulates pressure in real time to match it. No existing device does this. That is the innovation, and it is the only approach that addresses the root biomechanical cause of tracheal injury that the entire field has yet to solve.
What has been the most effective strategy for scaling your business?
CuffWay’s go-to-market follows four phases, all anchored around long-term intubation patients ventilated 48 hours or longer. Phase 1 lands with RT supervisors in community hospital ICUs, who live the problem every shift and can authorize disposable purchases without full VAC approval, giving CuffWay a foot in the door without navigating a full procurement cycle. The 4 hospitals with existing verbal pilot interest across the southeast are the entry point. Phase 2 expands into long-term acute care hospitals managing prolonged intubation and tracheostomy patients, where injury risk is highest and procurement layers are thinner. Phases 1 and 2 generate the ROI data that drives Phase 3, where documented hospital savings move the conversation up to value analysis committees for system-wide adoption across all ventilator and ICU beds, eventually becoming standard of care in the OR. Phase 4 targets national scale through licensing or acquisition by a major ventilator OEM, Puritan Bennett, Hamilton Medical, or Hospitech, integrating CuffWay directly into existing ventilator platforms. Competitors like Cuffill have already followed this path through acquisition by Medline, and CuffWay is targeting the same outcome within 5 years of FDA clearance.
Looking ahead, what are your goals for the future of your company?
In the near term, the focus is on closing the $500,000 pre-seed and hitting the milestones that de-risk the company before the $3 million seed round: reaching design freeze with C3 Medical, completing pig trachea validation studies at Georgia Southern, filing protection for the disposable tube set, completing the FDA Q-Sub, and converting existing hospital pilot interest into 10 signed LOIs by October 2026. The seed round funds full V&V testing, the limited human clinical study, and the 510(k) submission, with clearance targeted for early 2028, commercial launch in late 2028, and profitability in 2029. The long-term goal is licensing or acquisition by a major ventilator OEM, embedding CuffWay into ventilator platforms and distributing through established hospital relationships at a scale direct sales alone cannot reach. The deeper goal is simpler: get CuffWay into every ICU across the country, so that the 9 million patients injured each year by a problem that has never had a real solution finally have one.
